Swiped from Maggie's Farm

Source

Seems Like a Fair Deal to Me

How Do You Say ‘LOL’ in Spanish?

[O]rganizers from the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which sponsored the event, had laid out rows of tables covered in white cloth and adorned with banners decrying the militarization of the border — “Keep Families Together,” “Bridges Not Border Walls.” A few hundred yards away, several large tents contained the “Fast for Families,” where a core group of four activists has been abstaining from food since Tuesday to protest Congress’s inaction on immigration reform. With the wind blowing ripples across the Capitol reflecting pool, the air was cold, the mood somber. After the event, a handful of journalists, a small corps that still managed to outnumber the activists, mulled about the dry grass, but the scene was mostly empty.

More reporters than activists? This has inspired my suggestion for a bipartisan comprehensive reform plan: For every illegal alien we give amnesty, let’s deport one liberal journalist. The number of immigrants who get to stay would be limited to equal the number of media liberals who volunteer to leave. This is a win-win.

Can we include 'community activists' in the deal?

The Catfish That May Eat Chesapeake Bay

Blue catfish taking bite out of key species

A new study confirms that nonnative blue catfish around the Chesapeake have the potential to take a significant bite out of populations of important native species such as blue crabs and river herring.

The study examined the diets of blue catfish in portions of several Virginia tributaries and concluded they “may contribute to substantial losses of key fishery resources.”

Those losses could be “ecologically significant” for some species such as blueback herring, whose populations are already at low levels, the study concluded.

Note the weasel words "could be."

It also said blue catfish predation could have a greater impact on abundant species, such as blue crabs and menhaden, than previously thought. In part, that is because blue catfish are turning up in higher salinity water than expected.

“To me, the most surprising finding from our study was the extent to which we documented predators much farther downstream in the James — down to the Chesapeake Bay estuary proper,” said Greg Garman, director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Environmental Studies and lead author of the study. “We wouldn’t have expected that.”

Apparently, Blue Cats are slightly more salinity tolerant then originally believed, giving them significantly more potential range in the Bay and greater ability to move between different sub tributaries.

Blue catfish, which in rare cases can reach 100 pounds, can dominate rivers where they are introduced. In the James River near Hopewell, for instance, scientists estimate they account for 50–70 percent of all fish biomass. Scientists and fishery managers are worried that could mean trouble for native species if they are eaten in large numbers by blue catfish.

The new study examined 1,002 blue catfish 15 inches or longer that were taken from the Rappahannock and James rivers during the fall of 2011 and spring of 2012. They found that blue catfish ate a wide variety of species, including many of management concern such as blue crabs, blueback herring, American shad, softshell clams, menhaden and white perch.

Yes, big fish eat smaller fish, and if you take the known (or suspected)  biomass of any big predator, and multiply it by the might they might eat, you get a pretty big number:

Based on those results, the researchers estimated what the potential predation by blue catfish might have been during spring 2012 in two specific locations.

In Burwell Bay, a small area of the James River not far upstream from Newport News, they estimated blue catfish had the potential to consume 560,000–720,000 blue crabs. For perspective, that would be nearly 1 percent of the 765 million blue crabs estimated to be in the Bay in early 2012 by the annual Blue Crab Winter Dredge Survey.

Note the weasel words "potential predation." It's more likely they ate equal amounts of small baitfish that nobody outside the business know the name of, and turned them into nice, white, blue catfish flesh.

In that same area, the study estimated blue catfish may have consumed 670,000–820,000 Atlantic menhaden and 1.9 million–3.1 million softshell clams.

Farther upstream, near Manchester, they estimated that blue catfish might have consumed 8,000–10,000 blueback herring — a once-abundant species whose East Coast population is at a record low — and 14,000–18,000 white perch.

As you may know, I have a friend who takes people on guided trips to catch giant Blue Catfish in the Potomac River (and another who is threatening to). Since there is no reasonable chance of eliminating the Blue Cats from the system, we must accept that they will continue to flourish in the system, and expand their range until they reach some natural boundary.  The best, and possibly only, way to control the Blue Cats in the Bay region will be to find a market for them, and encourage a commercial and recreational fishery for them.

As I've always said, if you wanted to make a fish in Maryland disappear, find a market for them, and given commercial fisherman a short season to catch with heavy gear restriction, and a big minimum size. That will give them a number of  motivations to get as many as possible.

True, But That's a Feature, Not a Bug

It Costs $200B to Manage $500B In Federal Grants

It’s really easy to point out and decry waste in the government. Virtually all governments have waste. The Federal government is a monumental waste machine when it comes to money. The tab is $200 Billion just to manage all the grant money it remits each year. (Office of Management and Budget figures, 39% of spend on grants is for administration)

That pays for paperwork, salaries, benefits, offices, pensions, supplies and all the other costs of having an administrative staff oversee everything...

I'm not quite sure how they got these numbers, but they sound reasonable, if not conservative even.  Are they counting the costs of the Federal government to write the RFPs, evaluate the proposals, and administer the fund as well as the overhead at the grant receiving end?   I do know a lot about the latter, having been in soft-money science for more years than I care to recount.

The various entities that receive federal grant funds, which includes private and public college, NGOs, governments from all levels up to and including other federal agencies (funny how that works), can set their own overhead rates in conjunction with the granting agencies, and charge overhead. 

At the last institution I worked at, overhead was divided into three separate line items applied to different parts of a projects budget (including other overhead lines). Then 4% was added to the project as so-called "development funds", which were not supposed to considered overhead, but went to the top administration of the institution for... development?  Begging for more federal money.

As a result of the complicated formulas, it was annoying to calculate overhead when budgeting, but as a rule of thumb, if I expected to spend $1,000 in salaries, supplies, and equipment, the final budget would come almost exactly $1,500.  The administration fiddled with the rates annually, but rarely did the overall rate of overhead decline. 

A large bureaucracy has grown up in with relatively easy federal money, and the overhead from grants has fueled that growth.  And like any under-accounted streams of funds, a culture of abuse has grown up around it.

Monday Morning Secondhand Obamacare Schadenfreude

Not much real news occurs on a Sunday, but lots of editorializing, so most of today's entry's will be secondhand schadenfreude.

Writing from the point of view of the people who have to write the code for the monster and the disconnect between the people who order the site to be built and the builder:

Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality

Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.

A quick way to say it that I learned from a aeronautic engineer was "faster, better, cheaper; pick two."

Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.

Glen Reynolds, the Instapundit, follows up on this article in his own editorial in USA Today:

All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren't dumb. But they come from a background -- law and politics -- where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.

What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don't is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there's no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.

When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.

Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can't even launch a website.

Ann Althouse takes on the task of decoding New York Times talk on Obamacare:  This is the post where I paraphrase 10 things in the NYT article "Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash."

Here's the text, by Eric Lipson, Ian Austen, and Sharon LaFraniere. I'm blocking and indenting their text and boldfacing key words that made me feel compelled to paraphrase so I could see what they were muting or failing to pursue with investigative vigor.

1. Government officials and its contractors were in conflict, and some people — who? — made questionable decisions and demonstrated poor leadership.

[T]ensions between the government and its contractors, questionable decisions and weak leadership within the Medicare agency turned the rollout of the president’s signature program into a major humiliation.

2.The Obama administration, dazzled by its grandiose idea of making a dazzling website, refused even to engage with the reality that was plaguing the computer technicians: It was impossible to meet the deadline with a website that even worked.

The prime contractor, CGI Federal, had long before concluded that the administration was blindly enamored of an unrealistic goal: creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. Knowing how long it would take to complete and test the software, the company’s officials and other vendors believed that it was impossible to open a fully functioning exchange on Oct. 1...

 See all ten examples.

More from the NYT via Hot Air:  The administration doesn’t want you to call ObamaCare “redistribution,” but just to be clear… it is.

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall. …

The whole thing is built on a foundation of shifting lies.

John Fund at the National Review on line reminds us that legislation operates in two directions:  Yes, It Can . . . Be Repealed

Washington, D.C. — “These people don’t understand what the government is trying to do for them,” said then-chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Dan Rostenkowski in August 1989, after senior citizens angry over a federal health-care law booed him and chased him down a Chicago street. That law was repealed a few months later by a Democratic Congress and a Republican president who had supported it jus the year before.

Everything old is new again. We are starting to hear in D.C. that today’s unpopular health-care law might be in real trouble, spelled with a capital T, as The Music Man would put it.
...
Democrats may publicly pooh-pooh the chances of Obamacare’s suffering the same fate as the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. But privately they are a lot more nervous about it than they let on. And getting more so with each passing cycle of awful news.

Cabanal - "The Expulsion of Adam and Eve"

According to Juan Williams, as again highlighted by Ann Althouse, the administration claims that Republican who oppose Obamacare have committed the "Original Sin" and must be cast out of the garden.  That certainly bodes well for any attempt to fix problems with the law legislatively.

Williams is saying "I," indicating his oneness with the administration, which had him over to receive an injection of talking points. I think he noticed that slip with the pronoun "I," because the next thing he said was:

I think the president and the White House has gotten it, they don't like it. See how he restated who's gotten the message? It's the White House. They don't like it. Williams's "I" is repositioned in front of the verb think, which I find humorous, since he's not thinking for himself. He's delivering talking points.

It's what the White House now calls the original sin. They cannot work or expect Republicans to work with them to fix the plan. Wow. The Republicans are exiled from the Garden of Legislating. They cannot be worked with, for they have committed The Original Sin.

Oh well, I guess we'll just have to work on it through the courts: Here come more Obamacare lawsuits

It's about to get worse. The federal judiciary is currently hearing four cases challenging decisions made by the Internal Revenue Service that could soon deliver more major blows to the Affordable Care Act.

One such decision extended subsidies provided by Obamacare for lower-income individuals and families (those making up to four times the povery level) to people in the 36 states served by the federally-operated exchange, HealthCare.gov.

But the law spells out clearly that such federal subsidies will be granted "through an exchange established by the state" - not that they can be granted by the federal government.

Words, just words.  Maybe they should have read it before they voted on it? What a novel idea! But I'm sure that the Republicans can be counted on to help fix it legislatively if the courts, by some weird happenstance, choose to actually read it.

Some newsy items though...

State confirms health website security breach

Officials overseeing the Vermont Health Connect website confirmed Friday there was a security breach on the system last month in which one user got improper access to another user’s Social Security number and other data.

A report from state to federal officials overseeing the health insurance exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act said a consumer reported the incident with the Vermont Health Connect website on Oct. 17.

The consumer, whom officials would not identify, reported that he received in the mail — from an unnamed sender — a copy of his own application for insurance under the state exchange.“On the back of the envelope was hand-written ‘VERMONT HEALTH CONNECT IS NOT A SECURE WEBSITE!’ This was also (written) on the back of the last page of the printed out application,” said the incident report.

This is not the federal website, but it is just tip of the iceberg. For every known penetration of the websites, there are likely to be 100 unreported.

Lefties were quick to accuse conservatives of hacking the website, or attacking it with DOS (denial of service) attacks, but, honestly, when was the last time you heard of a cybercriminal who wasn't either an anarchoanti-capitalist or some other brand of left winger?  It strains credulity.

Wear a Shirt? No, It Makes Me Hit the Landing

Midnite Music - "Mummer's Dance"

Over at The Other McCain, Wombat-Socho has posted the weekly master list  "Rule 5 Sunday: Quiet Splendor."

Baby, It's Cold Outside (at the Beach)

After drinking as much coffee as I could stand while doing the Obamacare schadenfreude post, Georgia and I decided it was time to resurrect the winter clothes and venture out.

 Although the internet claimed the winds were only 25 or so from the northwest (with gusts to 33), there was no west apparent in what we saw at the beach.  It was slamming in from the north with all it might, blasting 28 F air through every crevice in our clothing.

The very first icicles of the season, from water seeping out of the cliff face. Note that the kudzu is totally browned out by frost. 

It was blowing hard enough to sculpt the beach down to the hard packed, wet sand, leaving behind shadows behind the bits of shell, and patterns in the layers of sand in the beach.  It was an extreme low tide, due to the wind, but fossil hunting wasn't too good, only 5 for the day. 

You can see the sand drifting along the beach in this shot.

 Spray is starting to freeze on the jetty.

Congratulations

To Stacy McCain, on the occasion of his becoming a grandfather:

Not a bad sized for a striped bass either.

And congratulations and best wishes to the parents, who begin a new life they might not be ready for, but are committed to for the duration.

Bitter Cold Sunday Morning Obamacare Schadenfreude

The cold air pushing down from Canada arrived sometime last night, and the temperatures plunged to 26 F, with clear skies and a wind chill of God only what from the 20-30 mph north winds.  A good morning to sit with a cup of coffee (or two or three) and sort through the wreckage of Obmacare for some newsworthy nuggets.

From the Opinion Pages of the New York Times, thanks to Stacy McCain, this well reasoned missive:

Weird NY Times Column: Not Supporting ObamaCare Is Slavery or Something

This is just downright bizarre:

[T]he South is once again committed to taking a backward path. By refusing to expand health care for the working poor through Medicaid, which is paid for by the federal government under Obamacare, most of the old Confederacy is committed to keeping millions of its own fellow citizens in poverty and poor health. They are dooming themselves, further, as the Left-Behind States.

Do you believe this? “Free” money from the federal government? Medicaid as a job-creation dynamo? While I have not bothered to dig down on the data here, the basic economics of it is like saying that if you take $5 out of your pants pocket and put it in your coat pocket, you will then have $10. Government has no money of its own to spend. Every cent expended by government must come either from tax revenue or from borrowing, and borrowing — i.e., deficit spending — is ultimately a drag on economic growth, because capital invested in government bonds (which is how deficit spending is financed) is capital not invested in private-sector businesses.

If Voters Had Known They’d Lose Their Insurance, They’d Have Voted For Romney

A Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research survey conducted from Nov. 18-20 asked voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012: “As you may know, millions of Americans have lost their insurance plans despite President Obama’s promise that, quote, ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’ If you knew in 2012 that this promise was not true, would you still have voted for Barack Obama?”

In response, 23 percent said they would not have voted to re-elect Obama, while 72 percent said they would still have voted for him. The largest number of defections were among female voters ages 18-54, 31 percent of whom said they would not have supported the president.

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans

and all the seas were ink

and all the trees were bread and cheese

what should we have to drink?

Yep, they lied, knowing they were lying, and counting on the gullible to accept those lies and re-elect them.  Nothing left to do but try to throw the bums out, if that's even possible with majority of the voters on the dole.

More from Smitty, also at The Other McCain: ObamaCare Is A River Of Lies, With Headwaters In Hell

Your attention is drawn to Andrew McCarthy, who states it succinctly:

The point of showing that Obama is carrying out a massive scheme to defraud — one that certainly would be prosecuted if committed in the private sector — is not to agitate for a prosecution that is never going to happen. It is to demonstrate that there is logic to the lies. There is an objective that the fraud aims to achieve. The scheme is the framework within which the myriad deceptions are peddled. Once you understand the scheme, once you can put the lies in a rational context, you understand why fraud was the president’s only option — and why “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” barely scratches the surface of Obamacare’s deceit.

Read, understand and motivate your neighbors. 2014 is past the whole “most important election of your life”. We’re past any easy remedy for the Statist cancer. No, our back is now to the wall.

Mary Landrieu, the anomalous Senator from the deep red state of Louisiana  is feeling the heat:

The number of people supporting her reelection has dropped from above the critical 50% mark to 41% in barely a month, and you simply can’t discount the timing of the Obamacare roll-out with this as coincidence. The specifics in this latest round of polling get even worse for her.

- “Fifty-four percent of those polled said they’d be less likely to vote for the Democratic senator’s re-election next year because of her vote for President Barack Obama’s health law.”

- Her “good” ratings dropped by 14 points (from 44-30%). Her negative job ratings went up 10 points with most being an increase in “poor” ratings (up 7 points).

- Landrieu lost ground among male and female white Democrats. Her positive job ratings dropped 17 points among while male Democrats and 19 points among white female Democrats.

- 70% of undecideds said they would be less likely to vote for Landrieu because she supported ObamaCare.

- When voters were asked what was more important, Landrieu’s seniority or electing someone new, 56-37% said electing someone new.

If the voters are truly feeling that way, they may want to recall what Senator Landrieu said only last month.

“….We did not wake up one morning and declare this the law. The people of the United States declared this through us as their Representatives. If they do not like it, they can unelect us. Believe me, they will have a great chance because I am up for reelection right now. They will be able to do that. But that is the way you do it.”

Say… that’s some pretty solid thinking. I may not often agree with Landrieu, but I must admit that she may be on to something there.

But Obama (and the media) is ready to change the subject (again): 

Well, who can blame him?  Today’s competing radio addresses tell the meta-story, as CNN reports.  Republicans focused on the meltdown at HHS over the ObamaCare rollout, while Barack Obama provided his 387th pivot to the economy:

While Republicans continued on the anti-Obamacare offensive, President Barack Obama largely pivoted away from the troubled rollout of Healthcare.gov, instead focusing his address on the economy.

Back to the nuts and bolts, and web design, this is a perfect match for the Obama administration: HealthCare.gov contractor had high confidence but low success

As the meeting began, one of the officials reminded the CGI employees that HealthCare.gov was “the president’s number one priority,” assured them that the discussion would be a “blame-free zone,” and then bored in. “We must be honest and open with each other,” the official said, according to documents obtained from participants in the session. “I have to know what I don’t know.”
...
For that day and the next, CGI staff huddled with government officials in the semicircular conference room at the headquarters of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency overseeing the project. They combed through 15 pages of spreadsheets they had brought, which spelled out the company’s level of confidence — high, medium or low — that individual components would be ready.

By the time HealthCare.gov launched 51/2 weeks later, many of those predictions proved wrong, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post and officials familiar with the project.

This is what happens when a bullshitter hires another bullshitter to do his work.  He should have known better.  But he had to keep Michele happy...

Fox News reported Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president of CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of first lady Michelle Obama and contributed $500 in 2011 and 2012 to Obama’s reelection campaign and another $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund. Further, George Schindler, president for U.S. and Canada for CGI Federal’s parent company CGI Group, donated to Obama’s reelection campaign after his company won the ObamaCare contract.

Yes, it's a little old, but we don't want it to get forgotten in the maze of scandals.

But for today's ultimate Obamacare takedown, we have to go to George Will:

For concision and precision in describing Barack Obama’s suddenly ambivalent relationship with his singular — actually, his single — achievement, the laurels go to Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.).

After Obama’s semi-demi-apology for millions of canceled insurance policies — an intended and predictable consequence of his crusade to liberate Americans from their childish choices of “substandard” policies sold by “bad apple” insurers — Scalise said Obama is like someone who burns down your house. Then shows up with an empty water bucket. Then lectures you about how defective the house was.

 "But wait", you say, "He's just quoting someone else!"

True enough, but then he goes on to finish the analogy in devastating style:

What is now inexplicably called Obama’s “fix” for the chaos he has created is surreal. He gives you permission to reoccupy your house — if you can get someone to rebuild it — but for only another year.

At least he has banished boredom from millions of lives. Although probably not from his.

 And just yesterday morning I thought I might have to discontinue this series for lack of material...

How Fall Striper Fishing Ought to Be

Linked by William Teach at Pirate's Cove in his weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links and at The American Power Blog in "Smokin' Sunday #Rule5."  Over at The Other McCain, Wombat-Socho has posted the weekly master list  "Rule 5 Sunday: Quiet Splendor."

How to Work With Millenials...

...if you really must.

Were Denisovans the Original Sluts and Bad Boys?

Ancient Humans Had Sex With Mystery Species, New DNA Study Shows 

The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

'Lord of the Rings'-type world'; I like that analogy.  We could start naming the various species of Homo and near Homo using Lord of the Rings inhabitants.  We already have the hobbit out on an island near Sumatra, name the Neanderthals after the Tolkien dwarves, as they seem to share a similar rugged physiognomy, make Homo heidelbergensis into Orcs etc. It's not much sillier than naming the planets after Roman gods. 

The new Denisovan genome indicates that this enigmatic population got around: Reich said at the meeting that they interbred with Neanderthals and with the ancestors of human populations that now live in China and other parts of East Asia, in addition to Oceanic populations, as his team previously reported. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the new genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago, which is neither human nor Neanderthal.

Perhaps the Denisovans had relatively loose morals compared to the other hominid species at the time.  There is primate precedent for species showing different amounts of sexual behavior.  Bonobos, the close relative of Chimpanzees, have very high levels of promiscuous behavior. 

The meeting was abuzz with conjecture about the identity of this potentially new population of humans. “We don’t have the faintest idea,” says Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum, who was not involved in the work. He speculates that the population could be related to Homo heidelbergensis, a species that left Africa around half a million years ago and later gave rise to Neanderthals in Europe. “Perhaps it lived on in Asia as well,” Stringer says.

Maybe Denisovan girls were cute by the standards of Neanderthals, and whatever  other hominids were around, and were often stolen away by marauding bands.  That's my working theory for now.  And since about all we have from the Denisovans is a couple of teeth, a finger and toe bone, it's hard to prove me wrong.

Over at The Other McCain, Wombat-Socho has posted the weekly master list  "Rule 5 Sunday: Quiet Splendor."

Beach Days Doubled Up

Two days worth of beach walking, combined.  Two nice days, Friday a little warmer than Saturday, 60ish instead of 50ish, but both partly sunny, breezy without being too windy.  And good low tides.

Friday was a remarkable day for shark's teeth.  We walked well up past Matoaka Cottages and back, and found 55 teeth, including this gloating grade Mako Shark's tooth that Georgia found.

The Eagles were out and about, but not in great numbers.  I wonder if some of the juveniles have moved out, either south for the winter, or off to found territories of their own.

I just liked the colors in this shot of houses at Calvert Beach.

As I said, today was a bit cooler, but still a very good day.  I hear the weather is expected to get cold soon, so it's good that we got out to take advantage of it.

Despite an even lower tide, the tooth hunting was not at good as yesterday; it seemed the sand covered more of the shell hash that holds the teeth.  But we still managed 17 including this top para symphyseal (near center)  tooth from a Snaggletooth; one of the nicest I've seen, if I must say so myself.

A kayaker disturbs some of the gulls on the south jetty.












Georgia sits for a rare portrait.

Saturday Breakfast Obamacare Schadenfreude

Get a big mug of coffee and prepare to dive into another day's worth of delicious Obamacare schadenfreude.

Yet another racist teabagger calls for Obamacare delay

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) says he would be open to a brief delay in the individual mandate if the problems with HealthCare.gov aren't fixed by the end of the month, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

"I think then we have to consider extending the deadline for the mandate, but let’s hope that doesn't happen," Franken told MPR.

Franken has so far been relatively quiet about potential changes to the health-care law, but he now joins a growing group of Senate Democrats in seats that could be targeted by the GOP in 2014 who are speaking up on the issue.

So, in an transparent effort to help Democrats whose seats have been placed in jeopardy by the chaos surrounding the Obamacare rollout, the administration is amending the law yet again by executive fiat and delaying the enrollment period for 2014 until after the midterm elections.  Why, it's almost like what's written in the letter of the law has no meaning.  Maybe they haven't read it.

The Obama administration plans to delay the start of next year's ObamaCare enrollment period, a move pitched as a way to give consumers and insurance companies more time to study their options -- but which also conveniently pushes the second round of enrollment past the 2014 midterm elections.

A Department of Health and Human Services official confirmed the change to Fox News. The decision does not affect those trying to enroll this year, despite the myriad problems with the launch of the law and HealthCare.gov. Rather, it affects those who will sign up late next year for 2015 coverage.

And another rube self-identifies: Stung by high costs, liberal Ivy League blogger slams flaws in Obamacare

"For us, at least in the college health insurance market, the ACA has truly been the 'law of unintended consequences,' wrote Michael Convente on The Daily Kos, on Monday.

"Relying on marketing slogans, some of which turned out not to be so correct, is turning out to be problematic."

Convente said the "progressive" UPenn Student Health Insurance Advisory Committee (SHIAC), on which he serves, doesn't mind funding artificial limbs or even gender reassignment surgery, but that forcing poor college students to pay for health care for children, which most don't use, is becoming a burden.

“Our population is entirely students.... we now have to cover pediatric dental even though none of us are even eligible to use that benefit," complained. “[O]ur committee is quite progressive when it comes to benefits offered (full prosthesis replacement, gender reassignment surgery, etc.) and low deductible (we're at $300. That's not a typo - three hundred)."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" - H. L. Mencke.  The same can be said for the self anointed elite.

Another "unanticipated" (except by all conservative commentators and most people with common sense) consequnce of Obamacare is starting to make it's effects known, the so called "Doc Shock."
Insurers restricting choice of doctors and hospitals to keep costs down

In one closely watched case, Seattle Children’s Hospital has filed suit against Washington’s insurance commissioner after a number of insurers kept it out of their provider networks. “It is unprecedented in our market to have major insurance plans exclude Seattle Children’s,” said Sandy Melzer, senior vice president.

A number of the nation’s top hospitals — including the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and children’s hospitals in Seattle, Houston and St. Louis — are cut out of most plans sold on the exchange.

 But, but, they promised, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!

The health care roll out is going so badly well the Kathleen Sebelius run Department of HHS is advocating that people bypass the $600,000,000 government website entirely, and buying directly from the insurers, effectively losing the "shopping" feature of the much maligned touted website.

A Catholic diocese in Pittsburgh won a legal victory in their fight against the birth control mandate of Obamacare, in the form of an injunction against the enforcement of the the mandate.

U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab granted an injunction sought by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, Diocese of Erie and several affiliated nonprofit groups that do not want their insurance administrators to provide what they call "preventive services" coverage.

The injunction allows them to continue to offer insurance that doesn't include contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs while litigation continues. Without the injunction, the insurance administrators for the organizations -- though not the dioceses themselves -- would have had to start providing the coverage Jan. 1.

Finally, Politico provides a handy check list of 10 people Obama should fire over Obamacare.  Shockingly, Kathleen Sebelius only makes the #2 slot:

1. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough
2. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
3. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Director Marilyn Tavenner
4. CMS Deputy Chief Information Officer Henry Chao
5. CMS Chief Information Officer Tony Trenkle
6. White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park
7. White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri
8. Jeffrey Zients
9. White House health policy adviser Jeanne Lambrew
10. HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary of Information Technology Frank Baitman

Enough?  No?  Ok, just one more.  Victor David Hansen at National Review Online discusses the manhandling of the language by the Preznit and his coterie in defense of Obamacare:

According to Obama, millions of Americans were once ignorant or uninformed, and thus will soon be pleased about their cancellations: “So the majority of folks will end up being better off. Of course, because the website’s not working right, they don’t necessarily know it.”

By that logic, the legions of Obama supporters who desperately sought and won exemptions from Obamacare are not “better off” now, but those stuck with it will be?

Clams Claim Greenland Ice Cap Growing

Clues in the Arctic fossil record suggest that 3-5,000 years ago, the ice sheet was the smallest it has been in the past 10,000 years

• Ice sheets are like bulldozers. As they grow, they push rocks, boulders, clams, fossils and other debris into piles called moraines.
• By dating ancient clams in moraines, scientists have come up with a new technique for determining when glaciers were smaller than they are today.
• The technique suggests that the Greenland Ice Sheet was at its smallest point in recent history 3-5,000 years ago — information that could improve our understanding of how ice responds to climate change.

...
So if a moraine contains fossils from 3,000 years ago, that means the glacier was growing — and smaller than it is today — 3,000 years ago.

This is exactly what the scientists saw in Greenland: They looked at 250 ancient clams from moraines in three western regions, and discovered that most of the fossils were between 3-5,000 years old.

The finding suggests that this was the period when the ice sheet’s western extent was at its smallest in recent history, Briner said.

“Because we see the most shells dating to the 5-3000-year period, we think that this is when the most land was ice-free, when large layers of mud and fossils were allowed to accumulate before the glacier came and bulldozed them up,” he said.

The history of the geologic era called the Pleistocene, the Ice Age era that we currently live in (though the hopeful call it the Holocene in the hope that the ice will not return) is an oscillation of the climate between a long glaciated cold mode, and a short warm period on a 100,000 year cycle:

We are currently in a nice warm period, but recent geologic history suggests that this is not likely to be permanent state.  It's not exactly good news for civilization that the Greenland Ice Cap has grown in the last 3-5,000 years.

Rule 5 Saturday - Jessica Biel

 What?  You want words too? NSFW Links.

Sometimes a Sandwich is Just a Sandwich

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

-George Orwell

Wombat-Socho goes off on the pseudo-intellectual anti-McDonalds activist Ian Bogost:

Which is about as good an introduction as we’re going to get for the mind-numbingly ridiculous The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom, an essay for The Atlantic scrawled by one Ian Bogost, whose surname is reminiscent not only of “bogosity” but of the Britishism “bogroll”, which is our English cousins’ word for the household item commonly used to remove things most similar to this essay from your rear end...

Bogost would like us to take him seriously as he delivers a post-modernist philosophical critique of McDonald’s, that food emporium so often mocked by the intellectualoids as a threat not only to the diet and health of America but the very world, so he drags in the French pseudo-philosopher Lacan and the deranged, posturing Slovenian Communist Slavoj Zizek to “prove” that we don’t really know what we’re doing when we order the McRib, Chicken McNuggets, Double Quarter Pounder, or the other items on the menu. No, we’re just slaves to our unconscious, which desires things that aren’t on the menu but are rather marketed without being marketed. This is obvious nonsense, and Bogost teases us with the notion that he knows it’s nonsense before dancing away on another binge of free-association tarted up with art history and pseudo-paradoxes that exist only in the mind of people without the brainpower to do their own thinking without the crutches of Lacan, Saussure and their ilk.

...

There are many reasons to visit a McDonald’s: cheap, tasty food served fast; large sodas sold for cheap in the pit of the summer; free wifi when the home internet is down. Nobody goes there for the ambience or to experience a gastronomic thrill, and only a deluded intellectualoid like Mr. Bogost would think anyone would go there driven by the unquiet urges of their id. In the end, the McRib is just a sandwich.

Amen, brother sister. Don't like it? Don't go there.

Wombat-socho was on time and within budget on last nights "Rule 5 Sunday."

Marvin Gaye Gets A Park on the Anacostia

I heard it through the grapevine...

Feds Indict MD Watermen for Poaching, Interstate Sale of Striped Bass

and one for witness tampering and intimidation. Ouch. The state may just slap you on the wrist and put you on welfare for a while, but the feds are likely to seek real jail time

Four commercial fishermen and one company were indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury in Baltimore for a criminal conspiracy involving the illegal harvesting and interstate sale of striped bass on the Chesapeake Bay, announced Robert G. Dreher, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, and Rod J. Rosenstein, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland.


According to court documents, Michael D. Hayden Jr., his company, William J. Lednum, Kent Sadler and Daniel Murphy engaged in a multi-year conspiracy during which time they harvested tens of thousands of pounds of striped bass on the Chesapeake Bay in violation of Maryland fishing regulations, falsified documents filed with the State of Maryland, and then transported and sold those poached fish in interstate commerce. In addition, after the investigation of these crimes began, it is alleged that Hayden attempted to manipulate some witnesses’ testimony while trying to outright prevent the testimony and cooperation of others. In addition, it is alleged that in at least one incident, Hayden threatened to retaliate against another potential witness he believed to be cooperating with investigators. Hayden was arrested on Sept. 17, 2013, having been charged in a criminal complaint with several counts of witness intimidation and retaliation.

The 26-count indictment charges the defendants with conspiracy, and Lacey Act violations. These charges carry possible terms of incarceration of five years. In addition, the witness intimidation/retaliation charges against Mr. Hayden each carry a maximum-term of 20 years in prison.

Play with fire long enough, and you'll get burned.